QUARRY
Catriona Bisset
Didier Iriarte Fattel
Flin Judd
A Future Visit to The Western Plains
A woman and two men stare into the boot of a parked white car. Through perfect Euclidean eyes hovering overhead, they observe a Dennis Family development with houses at every stage of completion: erected with an AstroTurf front yard, an empty shell, a timber frame, a concrete slab, a pile of dark soil framed by kerbs, a fresh timber fence, open fields of grass.
From here they trespass into Mountain View Quarry. They observe a barren landscape, with earth sliced like cake. A crab-like machine claws the earth, basalt and all, and dumps it in variegated piles, the epitome of entropy. The process of extraction creates a volcano in the negative – inverse architecture.
Materials flow over the site across time: 5 million years ago it was lava, now it’s contaminated earth and rock from the Metro tunnel developments dumped back into the pit. Predatory extraction is offset by capitalist environmentalism in the waste-to-fuel model of the anaerobic digestor. The greedy hand harvesting from our ruins; a colonial frontier cannibalised.
Children’s laughter and screams fill the air. The group sees water splashing as people dive into the quarry watering hole. Endangered Wollert Growling Grass Frogs thrive at the water’s edge among the new planting, rocks and discarded GEOJUICE cans. Landfill sculpted into rolling waves of grass are exemplars of ecological art and restoration. Nearby, sculpted mounds are scored by the tires of motorbikes, a parallel exemplar of land for human pleasure.
Night falls. Driving through the darkness with nothing but road ahead of them, these weary travellers, tired and hungry, spy the distant neon logo of an international conglomerate. This monument to consumption signals an oasis, a sense of familiarity for the people of Western Melbourne and the world, transcending age, politics, and class.
The group pulls into the servo. They walk to the 7-Eleven, passing a man shovelling eco-coal into the back of his ute while another purchases GEO JUICE from a vending machine.
Both are products of the quarry digestor’s divine alchemy: not water to wine but sewerage to energy drink, biowaste to biogas, landfill to power.
Returning to Melbourne, the group looks back in the direction of the fields, already flattened to a horizon, a theoretical place of pure possibility, ready for reproduction and renewal.